My Web Design Philosophy
For the past several years I’ve been trying to move my business towards developing marketing plans and integrated advertising campaigns. The continuity, efficiency, and synergy that comes from such longer term relationships has obvious benefits for everyone. Still, I still get calls to (re)design websites. No planning. No integration. Just the website please.
Invariably, these calls are from the very clients that need planning and integration the most. In every instance the companies who claim to want “only a website design” are unable to articulate a coherent marketing plan, much less attach realistic numbers or expectations to their marketing efforts.
So in the course of interviewing the client and making my proposal for “just the website” I end up making a mini-marketing analysis and a slew of suggestions. Most of these are purely common sense — after all, there is hardly a budget for research — and they apply to almost all my clients.
These suggestions and observations reflect my latest thinking on website design and development:
Web Design is mature and needs to take a backseat. Sure, there is room for variation of type, color, and proportion. But the formatting battles have been fought, and the truth is that certain familiar structures do indeed work better than others. The designer’s goal should be not be to reinvent the wheel, but to provide a elegant, logical, and easy to use framework for high-quality content.
Websites should be built using standards-based XHTML and CSS code with accessible design that works across all browsers and platforms. Most of today’s websites fail in this regard — either they “break” in certain browsers, require limiting display parameters, or they can’t be used by people with disabilities.
Standards-based XHTML and CSS design has other benefits, such as higher search engine rankings, less expensive and faster modifications and updates, better foreign-language translation, and easier to print webpages.
Fail to validate and pay the price for slower, more expensive updates, multiple incompatibilities, and increased user frustration.
Using a website should be as second-nature as reading a book. You don’t have to teach yourself how to navigate a book when you pick it up. Yet many websites force you to “hunt” and explore because the designer got carried away. Or they choose to use non-standard terminology and poor analogies. Viewers understand what common, familiar terms such as “Home”, “About”, and “Contact” mean — and they expect these common links to be easy to find — at the top of the page. Why confuse them?
People tend to decide what they are going to click on before they move their cursor. It is better to have just a few navigation items — five or six — and let people manually “drill down” — than it is to try to present all their choices via drop-down menus. Think about the PC applications you use — many people never venture into the menu system and often get confused when they do. Websites aren’t any different.
By now, people have figured out how to scroll. Longer pages are OK. What isn’t OK are long, wide, tightly spaced passages of text. Numerous Fortune 500 websites still publish their press releases and product literature this way. Who can read that? It is so easy with CSS to adjust the text to be legible — and considering that reading is what web viewers do, legibility should be one of the most important considerations for any website.
I think people need to ask themselves whether certain website features are included to satisfy corporate egos, the IT department’s need for job security, or simply to maintain parity with competitors? Is the website architecture a result of internal turf-fighting or an honest assessment of the user’s needs?
A decent-looking website for a respected middle market company. Except nobody bothered to test it in non-Microsoft browsers. That means they ignored at least 20% of their audience.
In ten years of designing websites, I’ve only seen four or five websites that use Flash well. I’ve seen thousands of sites that use Blogger, Flicker, MySpace, PayPal, Google, and Movable Type nicely. Wouldn’t it be great if more websites used the latter apps instead of the former?
Most small businesses would be best served with a simple one-page website listing business hours, a brief profile, and driving directions. $500 and forget about it.
I rather see a $5,000 website that gets updated weekly than a $20,000 website that gets updated annually. Give the balance of $15,000 to a web editor for a year of frequent updates and watch the site gain readership and grow organically.
Websites need an editor. The notion that some browser-based interface will allow an assistant in Human Resources to post job listings is flawed. Everything should go through a real editor for a consistent, professional, and personal voice.
Also, tying your website to proprietary, hard-to-learn WYSIWYG software like Dreamweaver or GoLive is a big mistake. The dirty little secret is that all you really need (or want) is a free text editor and ftp client. In many ways these basic apps are actually easier to use than the complicated web programs.
People come to the internet to read and look at images (web content). In other words, content is king. Yet, most website budgets are top heavy with a much larger investment in the website’s structure, while the content creation gets squeezed. I have a proposal under consideration in which I budgeted the same amount for new, web-specific writing and photography as I did for the design and coding. People are in a tizy over this, but what do you think will bring people to the website — better content or some new Java Script code?
Even worse than using stock photos is using lousy photos. Photography has been getting the shaft online since the web’s get-go, but it is finally time to budget for custom, web-specific photography.
Most ad agencies and graphic designers don’t understand this stuff. Most web developers and networking geeks don’t get it either. The best work is being done by small teams of talented individuals. Go to AdHub and check out the competition. See how many of their websites validate for web standards. See how many use objective, critical language and actually take a point of view. Pretty slim pickings if you ask me.
Look at this website. I value speed, legibility, and simplicity. This is my standard, and I’m proud of it.